Exploring St. Paul's past through the pages of the Pioneer Press.

The real Charlie Brown lived in Minnetonka

“Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz met Charlie Francis Brown in the 1940s, while they were art students in Minneapolis.

The two friends were working as teachers at the Art Instruction Schools in 1950, when Schulz’s comic strip was picked up for syndication.

Brown agreed to lend his name to the strip’s hard-luck protagonist, not knowing it would soon become one of the most recognizable in American popular culture.

Former Pioneer Press reporter Cynthia Boyd profiled the real Charlie Brown in 1979. He was “a sandy-haired 53-year-old bachelor who once was accused of sassing a policeman because he gave his name as Charlie Brown,” she wrote.

At the time Boyd interviewed him, Brown’s health — he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer — had forced him to retire from his job as a program director with Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center. He would die four years later.

Brown had much in common with his fictional namesake — he even owned a dog, although its name was McGregor, rather than Snoopy. Brown “also was known for his insecurities, his flops as a schoolboy athlete and his failed relationships,” according to an obituary that ran in the St. Paul Dispatch in 1983. “But he was remembered for his geniality, which carried him through an uneven career as an artist and a bout with alcoholism.”

Many of Schulz’s other “Peanuts” characters were also modeled after real people he knew in the Twin Cities, and many of the strip’s backdrops are modeled after neighborhoods in his hometown of St. Paul. These links to Schulz’s past are preserved in the new “Peanuts” movie, writes PiPress film critic Chris Hewitt. It premieres Nov. 6.